Dr.Zom:The argument could be made that the reason she's not a star is that no one realized her potential. Except Ebert.

Jennifer Jason Leigh is a great actress. But there's a difference between being a great actor and a movie star. Sean Connery is a movie star, but not a great actor. JT Walsh was a great actor, but not a movie star. You sometimes get someone like Amy Adams or Anne Hathaway.

The reason why Mirror, Mirror is a poor film is that they picked a movie star to be the queen, rather than a great actress. Julia Roberts is a movie star. She appears on the posters for films, but just doesn't have the acting chops for such a part. Nicole Kidman or Sophie Marceau would have rocked it.

Lsherm:tenpoundsofcheese: Agree on all of those except Leon and Full Metal Jacket.Butch Cassidy I almost agree with.

In all fairness, "The Professional" released in the states wasn't "Leon" and Ebert reviewed the US release. They cut out almost 45 minutes of the movie, and most of those minutes dealt with the problem of having a 12 year-old girl acting as a sidekick on murder for hire missions. The full version is a much better movie.

Fully agree with you on "The Professional." The full version "Leon" is a much stronger film.

And I can see and agree with his points on "Full Metal Jacket." It is something of a wandering, formless movie. It doesn't mean I didn't enjoy more than Ebert did, but it is a weakness in the movie.

Even at those times when I disagreed with Ebert's review, I could usually understand and accept his point of view. He was still 100% wrong about "Kick Ass" and he was 100% wrong about video games could never be considered art. But I also appreciated how he could say, "This movie is a big dumb action movie, but it's an enjoyable big dumb action movie, so 3 Stars."

eh, i've found over the years that i rarely ever held the same viewpoint on a movie as ebert, even when it came to movies he rated well i didn't like it for the same reason he liked it

but that's ok, nobody has to have the same viewpoint on everything (i mean, look at Pauline Kael), and you gotta respect the guy for backing up his opinion with some great writing (without boring anybody)

Dr.Zom:North, 1994"I hated this movie. Hated, hated, hated, hated, hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it."

Stargate, 1994"The movie Ed Wood, about the worst director of all time, was made to prepare us for Stargate."

Mad Dog Time, 1996"Mad Dog Time is the first movie I have seen that does not improve on the sight of a blank screen viewed for the same length of time. Oh, I've seen bad movies before. But they usually made me care about how bad they were. Watching Mad Dog Time is like waiting for the bus in a city where you're not sure they have a bus line."

B.A.P.S., 1997"My guess is that African Americans will be offended by the movie, and whites will be embarrassed. The movie will bring us all together, I imagine, in paralyzing boredom."

Armageddon, 1998"No matter what they're charging to get in, it's worth more to get out."

Godzilla, 1998"Going to see Godzilla at the Palais of the Cannes Film Festival is like attending a satanic ritual in St. Peter's Basilica."

Battlefield Earth, 2000"Battlefield Earth is like taking a bus trip with someone who has needed a bath for a long time. It's not merely bad; it's unpleasant in a hostile way."

Crocodile Dundee In Los Angeles, 2001"I've seen audits that were more thrilling."

Freddy Got Fingered, 2001"This movie doesn't scrape the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn't the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn't below the bottom of the barrel. This movie doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels."

How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days, 2003"Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson star. I neglected to mention that, maybe because I was trying to place them in this review's version of the Witness Protection Program. If I were taken off the movie beat and assigned to cover the interior design of bowling ...

Fano:[images.andrewsmcmeel.com image 200x289]Before there was Tvtropes...

"WillisDuct. In all movies about a lone hero who battles terroristson a boat/building/plane, there is always oneduct which doesn't appear on theterrorists' copy of the blueprints but which the hero immediately locates and uses."

A lot of his reviews are spot on. A lot of his 'complaints' seems to be the point of the movies he was reviewing, and this is true of a lot of his successors, too.

Donnie Darko - In Jake Gyllenhaal, he finds an actor able to suggest an intriguing kind of disturbance; the character is more curious than frightened, more quixotic than eccentric, and he sets a nice tone for the movie. But somehow the control fades in the closing scenes, and our hands, which have been so full, close on emptiness.

That seems to me to be the exact journey we were intended to go on. At the end everything we thought was substantial is vapor.

gunga galunga:Except it was Siskel who felt that way. I'm sure Ebert didn't care for it either but it was always something Gene biatched about.

Roger would at least look at it objectively when kids were placed in harms way, If the Sun Times ever decides to finally wake up, his review of Cape Fear shows that. Siskel was always "Nope thats a cheap trick" black and white kind of guy when it came to that sort of thing. And come to think of it I cannot honestly think of any review where he genuinely didn't biatch about it.

Of these reviews, the only one Ebert really missed on was Fast Times at Ridgemont High. A better film than Ferris Bueller (way overrated) and the John Hughes/Molly Ringwald NerdGasms a few years later....

Also I think Sean Penn and Forrest Whittaker would beg to differ on Jennifer Jason Leigh "becoming a big star" after FT

Valacirca:Christian Bale: DonkeyDixon: Christian Bale: Clearly he doesn't like violence and that affected his reviews of Fight Club and Clockwork Orange, but that paragraph about Donnie Darko is absolute perfection. Even the pun about "trying to land it"

He must have changed his opinion after a rewatch. I first learned about that movie from him in some kind of "movies to rent that you never saw in the theater" segment.

Well look at what he says:

"In Jake Gyllenhaal, he finds an actor able to suggest an intriguing kind of disturbance; the character is more curious than frightened, more quixotic than eccentric, and he sets a nice tone for the movie. But somehow the control fades in the closing scenes, and our hands, which have been so full, close on emptiness. 'Donnie Darko' is the one that got away. But it was fun trying to land it."

He doesn't say the movie is bad; he basically says it's a good movie with an unsatisfying ending, and that the film has a lot to offer even if it's flawed.

I have to wonder if this was his original review, which I believe was made after seeing the original Sundance cut that was later released as the Director's Cut.

Never, ever watch the Director's Cut of Donnie Darko.

He gave 2 1/2 stars to the original theatrical cut, then upgraded it to 3 stars with the director's cut, saying it explained enough of the mystery for him o enjoy it more.

RoyFokker'sGhost:I saw the new Die Hard. It wasn't terrible, fairly fun. Definitely had the spirit of the franchise when Bruce Willis jumps off a roof, flipping off the pilot of a Hind-D as he falls away from the explosion and the D crashes into the roof.

It was definitely spiritually closer to Die Hard than Live Free or Die Hard, but it was still pretty mediocre. I did laugh a few times though, non-ironically, and there were a ton of throwbacks to the original. It didn't really get going until the car chase was over, which admittedly was a pretty decent chase.

Dr.Zom:The Village, 2004"To call it an anticlimax would be an insult not only to climaxes but to prefixes. It's a crummy secret, about one step up the ladder of narrative originality from It Was All a Dream. It's so witless, in fact, that when we do discover the secret, we want to rewind the film so we don't know the secret anymore. And then keep on rewinding, and rewinding, until we're back at the beginning, and can get up from our seats and walk backward out of the theater and go down the up escalator and watch the money spring from the cash register into our pockets."

rcantley:Dr.Zom: The Village, 2004"To call it an anticlimax would be an insult not only to climaxes but to prefixes. It's a crummy secret, about one step up the ladder of narrative originality from It Was All a Dream. It's so witless, in fact, that when we do discover the secret, we want to rewind the film so we don't know the secret anymore. And then keep on rewinding, and rewinding, until we're back at the beginning, and can get up from our seats and walk backward out of the theater and go down the up escalator and watch the money spring from the cash register into our pockets."

My God... it's... beautiful.

I went to a midnight screening of The Village. I have never walked out of a movie so angry before or since. When I read the review the next morning, it put a huge smile on my face.

FIGHT CLUB: "It's macho porn -- the sex movie Hollywood has been moving toward for years, in which eroticism between the sexes is replaced by all-guy locker-room fights. Women, who have had a lifetime of practice at dealing with little-boy posturing, will instinctively see through it; men may get off on the testosterone rush."

This makes me think he didn't actually watch the movie, but only the trailer.

gunga galunga:I went to a midnight screening of The Village. I have never walked out of a movie so angry before or since. When I read the review the next morning, it put a huge smile on my face.

I don't claim to be smart about mystery stories. I never guess the killer on NSIC or Psych but I guessed the "twist" in The Village based on the trailer and that it was an M Night film. Ebert was right on that one.

SurfaceTension:Gunderson: I have to agree with him on "Full Metal Jacket". Boot camp was amazing. After boot camp were snippets that were barely organized and the film just ran out of gas.

I can't help but think that's almost the point, that to that end it mirrored Vietnam. Just a thought, though.

that's kind of how stanley kubrick made all of his movies tho, in a way most movies are like 2 hours of forcing a square peg character through a round hole, kubrick's are like the price is right's Plinko game - you watch the character bounce around until they hit a wall

probably why he loved to do movies about soldiers, ciminals and crazy people so much

Mugato:gunga galunga: I went to a midnight screening of The Village. I have never walked out of a movie so angry before or since. When I read the review the next morning, it put a huge smile on my face.

I don't claim to be smart about mystery stories. I never guess the killer on NSIC or Psych but I guessed the "twist" in The Village based on the trailer and that it was an M Night film. Ebert was right on that one.

Apart from the "fark you, audience" twist, that movie contained the worst performances of William Hurt, Sigourney Weaver, Joaquim Pheonix, and Adrien Brody's careers. It ended up being a breakout role for the always bland Bryce Dallas Howard, but only because she didn't suck as much as everybody else. Really, the only saving grace of that cast was Judy Greer.

L.D. Ablo:wildcardjack: He took a shiat on Fear and Loathing.Of course it's a jumbled mess without a consistent theme. Thats the whole point.

Came here to say the same thing. The review surprised me; I assumed that Roger had read the book.

The book is an incoherent drug-addled mess that is very entertaining.

The movie is also an incoherent drug-addled mess that is very entertaining.

If you tried to impose some narrative structure on the movie, it would have been unfaithful to the source and, like you said, it would have entirely missed the point.

I agree that the movie might not be any fun unless you're read the book. But everyone should read the book. It's a glorious trainwreck. Getting Terry Gilliam, Johnny Depp, Benecio del Toro, and all the cameos in on the movie just makes it even better.

Ebert's philosophy was always to have the film stand on its own merits. He wasn't the sort to read a book a movie was coming out for unless it was something he was going to read anyway. Hunger Games had to stand on its own without reading the book first, etc. It's fine if the movie caters mostly to those who read the book to fill in gaps that the movie doesn't bother to show, but a film critic is going to call that out and it does harm the film.

jake_lex:funktilious_j: Clockwork Orange was a good movie about a distopian society. But I love movies about distopian societies. And I agree that Full Metal Jacket was 2 seperate movies. But I like it as well.

But c'mon, he made The Shining, which Stephen King doesn't like, which automatically makes it good.

Full Metal Jacket is not 2 separate movies. Everything set up in the first half pays off in the second.

I mean, the second half of the movie is the confirmation of Sgt. Hartman telling Joker "You're a killer, not a writer!"

Except Joker loses his crap when he actually comes under fire , drops his gun and has to be saved by Raptorman (or whatever his sidekick's name was).

HallsOfMandos:jake_lex: funktilious_j: Clockwork Orange was a good movie about a distopian society. But I love movies about distopian societies. And I agree that Full Metal Jacket was 2 seperate movies. But I like it as well.

But c'mon, he made The Shining, which Stephen King doesn't like, which automatically makes it good.

Full Metal Jacket is not 2 separate movies. Everything set up in the first half pays off in the second.

I mean, the second half of the movie is the confirmation of Sgt. Hartman telling Joker "You're a killer, not a writer!"

Except Joker loses his crap when he actually comes under fire , drops his gun and has to be saved by Raptorman (or whatever his sidekick's name was).

Nevermind - forgot that he pulls the trigger to put the sniper out of her misery after Raptorman shot her.

ltdanman44:i enjoy and respect Ebert, but he didn't like gladiator and I thought it was one of the best I had ever seen.

He didn't like it because he felt it was too easy of a movie, in so far as it used every grand scape film trick in the book to either tug at your heart or open awe. I took tread that had been treaded by so many films before it and mashed it together. His dislike was not of the movie but for the director going the easy route.

Much like his Fast Times review, he thought the movie had more potential and that the talent and scope were wasted.

ThunderPelvis:Out of curiosity, I just read Ebert's review of Titanic. He gave it a literary blowjob, and that movie was the biggest, most overrated piece of sh*t I've ever had the misfortune of gagging my way halfway through and turning off in disgust. So, you'll have to pardon me if I don't take this list too seriously.

AdamK:SurfaceTension: Gunderson: I have to agree with him on "Full Metal Jacket". Boot camp was amazing. After boot camp were snippets that were barely organized and the film just ran out of gas.

I can't help but think that's almost the point, that to that end it mirrored Vietnam. Just a thought, though.

that's kind of how stanley kubrick made all of his movies tho, in a way most movies are like 2 hours of forcing a square peg character through a round hole, kubrick's are like the price is right's Plinko game - you watch the character bounce around until they hit a wall

probably why he loved to do movies about soldiers, ciminals and crazy people so much

Someone once described the cinematography of his films as "watching a movie of a movie" or something along those lines. I like that, and it really describes the distance and coldness slow pace that pervades all his films.

MyKingdomForYourHorse:ltdanman44: i enjoy and respect Ebert, but he didn't like gladiator and I thought it was one of the best I had ever seen.

He didn't like it because he felt it was too easy of a movie, in so far as it used every grand scape film trick in the book to either tug at your heart or open awe. I took tread that had been treaded by so many films before it and mashed it together. His dislike was not of the movie but for the director going the easy route.

Much like his Fast Times review, he thought the movie had more potential and that the talent and scope were wasted.

gunga galunga:ThunderPelvis: Out of curiosity, I just read Ebert's review of Titanic. He gave it a literary blowjob, and that movie was the biggest, most overrated piece of sh*t I've ever had the misfortune of gagging my way halfway through and turning off in disgust. So, you'll have to pardon me if I don't take this list too seriously.

/RIP, anyway. Seemed like a good guy.

stoplikingwhatidontlike.jpg

both gladiator and titanic are bland period pieces with high production values, tho i think gladiator was saved by way better side characters and a great soundtrack

MyKingdomForYourHorse:ltdanman44: i enjoy and respect Ebert, but he didn't like gladiator and I thought it was one of the best I had ever seen.

He didn't like it because he felt it was too easy of a movie, in so far as it used every grand scape film trick in the book to either tug at your heart or open awe. I took tread that had been treaded by so many films before it and mashed it together. His dislike was not of the movie but for the director going the easy route.

Much like his Fast Times review, he thought the movie had more potential and that the talent and scope were wasted.

IIRC, he didn't like the treatment of of the Jennifer Jason Leigh character. There he really missed the point. All the other teen comedies were showing sex as all fun and games. For this girl, sex was a painful deflowering in a baseball dugout and a premature spurting in the pool house followed by "Ding! Dong! You're pregnant!" Which is what sex ends up being like for many teens. It was supposed to be awkward and uncomfortable.

gunga galunga:IIRC, he didn't like the treatment of of the Jennifer Jason Leigh character. There he really missed the point. All the other teen comedies were showing sex as all fun and games. For this girl, sex was a painful deflowering in a baseball dugout and a premature spurting in the pool house followed by "Ding! Dong! You're pregnant!" Which is what sex ends up being like for many teens. It was supposed to be awkward and uncomfortable.

I agree with him to some degree though, there was potential lost in character development for all involved. Granted, part of this was the demographic the film was aimed at, and that was part of the charm of those movies was that they accurately captured the teen essence of that day, but I agree with him that a much deeper and more meaningful message was lost in that movie.

It was good, I'm not arguing that I just think it could have been SO much better.

AdamK:both gladiator and titanic are bland period pieces with high production values, tho i think gladiator was saved by way better side characters and a great soundtrack

James Cameron doesn't do what James Cameron does for James Cameron. James Cameron does what James Cameron does because James Cameron is James Cameron! ego your argument is invalid.

SurfaceTension:AdamK: SurfaceTension: Gunderson: I have to agree with him on "Full Metal Jacket". Boot camp was amazing. After boot camp were snippets that were barely organized and the film just ran out of gas.

I can't help but think that's almost the point, that to that end it mirrored Vietnam. Just a thought, though.

that's kind of how stanley kubrick made all of his movies tho, in a way most movies are like 2 hours of forcing a square peg character through a round hole, kubrick's are like the price is right's Plinko game - you watch the character bounce around until they hit a wall

probably why he loved to do movies about soldiers, ciminals and crazy people so much

Someone once described the cinematography of his films as "watching a movie of a movie" or something along those lines. I like that, and it really describes the distance and coldness slow pace that pervades all his films.

yeah his movies are definitely very coldly framed and efficient, probably because they were constantly re-shooting scenes so actors would become desensitized to what they were doing, with the goal basically being that his movies should feel like the audience is a fly on the wall watching un-aware characters do what they do

MyKingdomForYourHorse:gunga galunga: IIRC, he didn't like the treatment of of the Jennifer Jason Leigh character. There he really missed the point. All the other teen comedies were showing sex as all fun and games. For this girl, sex was a painful deflowering in a baseball dugout and a premature spurting in the pool house followed by "Ding! Dong! You're pregnant!" Which is what sex ends up being like for many teens. It was supposed to be awkward and uncomfortable.

I agree with him to some degree though, there was potential lost in character development for all involved. Granted, part of this was the demographic the film was aimed at, and that was part of the charm of those movies was that they accurately captured the teen essence of that day, but I agree with him that a much deeper and more meaningful message was lost in that movie.

And I can see that point. There really wasn't much more to her than "I wanna have sex. Oh, it turns out that sex is Serious Business. Okay, I'll be fine with a platonic relationship with somebody I care about."

He never specifically explained why, but suggested in other reviews that he thought it was/would be treacly and overblown. Ebert: "Since 'The Sound of Music,' unhappily, musicals have been locked into the reserved-seat format. That, in turn, apparently means they have to be long, expensive, weighed down with unnecessary production values and filled with pretension."

gunga galunga:And I can see that point. There really wasn't much more to her than "I wanna have sex. Oh, it turns out that sex is Serious Business. Okay, I'll be fine with a platonic relationship with somebody I care about."

Even at those times when I disagreed with Ebert's review, I could usually understand and accept his point of view. He was still 100% wrong about "Kick Ass" and he was 100% wrong about video games could never be considered art. But I also appreciated how he could say, "This movie is a big dumb action movie, but it's an enjoyable big dumb action movie, so 3 Stars."

Agree about Kick-Ass. His review was pretty venomous but I thought it delivered. It was a fun action movie.